nt no searchlight into the
future, neither did his eyes behold the Star in the East.

We are all making and shaping history, and how much, none of us knows,
any more than did Augustus.

Julius Caesar had no son to take his place, so he named his nephew,
Augustus, his heir. Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, his adopted
child. Caligula, successor of Tiberius, was the son of the great Roman
General, Germanicus. Caligula revealed his good sense by drinking life
to its lees in a reign of four years, dying without heirs--Nature
refusing to transmit either infamy or genius. Claudius, an uncle of
Caligula, accepted the vacant place, as it seemed to him there was no
one else could fill it so well. Claudius had the felicity to be married
four times, and left several sons, but Fate had it that he should be
followed by Nero, his stepson, who called himself "Caesar," yet in whose
veins there leaped not a single Caesarean corpuscle.

The guardian and tutor of Nero was Lucius Seneca, the greatest, best and
wisest man of his time, a fact I here state in order to show the vanity
of pedagogics. Harking back once more to Augustus, let it be known that
but for him Seneca would probably have never left his mark upon this
bank and shoal of time. Seneca was a Spaniard, born in Cordova, a Roman
Province, that was made so by Augustus, under whose kindly and placating
influence all citizens of Hispania became Roman citizens--just as, when
California was admitted to the Union, every man in the State was
declared a naturalized citizen of the United States, the act being
performed for political purposes, based on the precedents of Augustus,
and never done before nor since in America.

Seneca was four years old when his father's family moved from Cordova
to Rome; this was three years before the birth of Christ. Years pass,
but the human heart is forever the same. The elder Seneca, Marcus
Seneca, had ambitions--he was a great man in Cordova: he could memorize
a list of two thousand words. These words had no relationship one to
another, and Marcus Seneca could not put words together so as to make
good sense, but his name was "Loisette": he had a scheme of mnemonics
that he imparted for a consideration. He was also a teacher of
elocution, and had compiled a yearbook of the sayings of Horace, which
secured him a knighthood. Augustus paid his colonists pretty
compliments, very much as England gives out brevets to Strathcona and
other worthy Canadia